Any given day on Tumblr features predictable imagery: flowers edited to remove saturation, Starbucks cups held by thin, white hands covered in knuckle rings and turquoise bracelets, Charles Bukowski poetry against the backdrop of pastel Pantone prints. The social networking site is a hodgepodge o...

Tim Simons and I met on Twitter after I tweeted: “Is it just me or is Jonah from Veep cute?” Simons plays the smarmy White House liaison Jonah Ryan on HBO’s send-up of American politics, which premieres its fourth season this Sunday, April 12. On the show, he’s universally-hated, but in real life...

Julia Hobsbawm is on a mission to make us rethink everything we believe about work and success. She draws on systems theory and British class formation and disruptive innovation—all to sell an idea lots of us find ugly, distasteful, even dangerous.
Here it is: She believes in the power of netw...

I don’t remember what I was wearing when I got sexually assaulted my freshman year, but I do remember what I wore when I figured out what had happened. It was the autumn of 2008, and I had just left a sorority house, where I had given a lecture on consent, safe sex, and best practices for helping...

This past weekend I went back to my home state of Indiana to watch two of the best people I know get married. It was a bit of a miracle that I made it, and I was loath to return for a few different reasons. One of the big ones was that the Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, had just signed a bill c...

In 1836, moralist A.B. Muzzey wrote, “Character is like stock in trade; the more of it a man possesses, the greater are his facilities for making additions to it.”
But in 1844, Henry Ward Beecher warned of “the fashionable idler, whose riches defeat every object for which God gave him birth.” ...

One might think the house would look different from the others. It doesn’t, really—there are rows of peaked, double-wide Victorians just like it on this side street in West Philly. But once you step inside it’s a different story. The same way that minimalist furniture signals wealth or mustard-co...

It used to be great, then it got better, then it was not-so-great, then it got horrible, and now it’s fabulous.”
That’s the history of Cleveland’s last 50 years, from a man who knows: Dean Rufus, a former radio DJ and staple of Cleveland’s gay scene. Rufus has lived here for nearly his whole l...

In December of last year, Barack Obama became the first president to write code. A video of the digital milestone shows the president in the White House surrounded by eager middle-school students from New Jersey, carefully tapping out a single line of Javascript on a laptop keyboard. In this symb...

The surrounding neighborhood is rapidly becoming whiter and wealthier, but the West Oakland BART station still feels like it's in a somewhat poor and solidly black neighborhood. Black vendors outside sell jewelry, incense and shea butter. A few revolutionary communists mill about in fanny packs a...

The small pile of books resting on my bedside table is entirely stuffed with men. Despicable men, perverse men, egocentric men; men who lie, who whore and cheat, men who let their own throbbing members do the thinking. I keep them very close.
“I can’t believe you actually like this shit,” my ...